>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Day2IQ, brought to you by Day2IQ. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Day2IQ headquarters. They used to be called Mesosphere. They rebranded the company. They've got a much bigger focus than just Mesos and supporting Mesos. So we're here to get the story, really talk about enterprise's journey to cloud native, and we're excited to have our first guest. He's Brian Kenyon, the chief strategy officer. Brian, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So DayQI, Day2IQ. >> Correct. >> I'm going to get it eventually, by the end of the day. Interesting name. What does Day2IQ mean? Why did you guys rebrand the company that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we were formerly known as Mesosphere, and the technology that we founded the company on was an open source package called Mesos, so the name naturally had a very close tie with Mesos and Mesosphere. So as we looked to rebrand the company and really enter the market with some of the changes we've seen in the evolution of cloud native, we focused on where customers were having trouble, where they were focused on operations, how they were going to take these concepts and these great ideas that were pervasive in the concept of cloud native and make them institutionalized and operationalized inside their companies. And what we found was, you know, day zero is when you played around and tested things, and day one is when you got it installed and stood up, but day two is when you really focused on the operations. How do I make this enterprise-ready? How do I make this fit my business? All of that happened on day two and after. So we saw that as a pretty natural way to focus our energy and focus our market penetration on day two. >> Right. And you also expanded beyond just kind of the Mesos ecosystem into some other areas, in containers, in Kubernetes, also data. So you guys are taking a little broader approach than maybe the company had at the original launch. >> Yeah, absolutely. And you've heard from one of our founders already and you spoke to our head of engineering. So I'm the newest of those, right? I joined in February, so I'm just, you know, almost 10 months in. So when I joined, I spent a lot of time meeting with our customers, talking to partners, talking to other folks and vendors in the space, and what we saw was there was a massive shift happening from where cloud native started maybe three, four, five years ago to where it is today, and one of the biggest changes has been around the emergence of Kubernetes, which has turned into a de facto standard for containers in cloud native. And so as we've evolved and moved into this D2IQ name, as we've started focusing on meeting our customer, we've obviously taken on a bigger stance inside the Kubernetes community and the Kubernetes product lines. >> Right. So what did you see? I mean, you're a long-time security executive. You've been in strategy and security for years and years and years. What did you see in this opportunity with a small start-up to get you to leave kind of the safe, comfortable, pretty standard corporate job into jumping back into this-- >> Nobody's ever said security's safe, so that's awesome. >> Well, safe certainly in terms of job security. (mumbles) my goodness, a big shill out there these days. >> It is, it is. >> But what did you see? >> I saw the future, is really what I saw. When you really took a step back and you looked at where compute was going and how organizations were starting to adopt new application methodologies, new application architectures, it was very clear that cloud had taken on a big portion of that and the concept of cloud native and open source technologies was becoming more and more prominent. And so as we looked at this, not only did we see a unique opportunity with the cloud native space, but if you fast forward a couple years, customers are going to be coming back around and starting to have conversations around security. How do I secure this? What, how do my CISOs and my operational folks in security understand this and how do they really start to apply the same controls and visibility to it? So it was a unique opportunity to get in and focus on where the future of our industry's going. >> Right. So it's an interesting thing with open source, and open source specifically in the enterprise. I think my favorite open source quote is, yeah, it's free like a puppy. You know, it's not free. You need support and you need training and you need a lot of help. So when you guys work with enterprises and they're incorporating more and more open source into their technology stack, what are some of the challenges that you guys are coming in to help them to actually get beyond a simple free download and the latest cool version to actually running in production, heavy duty loads, really important workloads. >> Absolutely. Yeah, one of the biggest shortfalls we see is obviously expertise, right? So there's a massive amount of innovation and capability that can be, can really be captured through open source software. The challenge is, it's all community-based. So folks contribute code, they sign it in, it's available for everybody to use, but how long is that code updated for? How long is it maintained? How do new features get added? What you see is you see a huge spike in interest and enthusiasm, and then just like every other hype cycle, you get to a trough of disillusionment where people move on to the next thing and the next thing in the open source community. And so organizations who want to leverage that innovation, want to focus their operations around open source, either for cost savings or time to market, find themselves a couple years later looking at code that's been abandoned, projects that aren't maintained anymore. We saw this in security with things like OpenSSL, right? One of the largest SSL libraries used across the entire security landscape. There were two people in the world maintaining that code. And so when a massive security vulnerability hit, organizations were scrambling. We want to stop that now for organizations that want to use open source. We, Day2IQ, want to bring our innovation, our expertise, to bring that open source to the customers and make sure that it's enterprise-ready, it's enterprise-supported, and it's enterprise-scalable. >> Right. So you guys have basically three market offerings, if I understand right. You've got a solution set where you're taking the core software and building solutions around it. You've got services, professional services, to get it in, get it up, and probably supported, so I have a 1-800 somebody to call, please, which, you couldn't call those two people in that case. >> Exactly. >> And then training, is that right? So those are how you're basically enterprise-hardening an open source kernel to get to a great solution for the customer. >> Yeah, what I'd also add in there is services. So whether it's advisory services, implementation services, or just kind of more traditional, our focus is really about meeting the customer where they need us. If you look at cloud and cloud native today, almost every customer across the globe is at a different evolution or a different maturity in that journey, and so some are at the very beginning where they're learning. Others are more towards the end where they're focused on operations and how do I streamline this, how do I hire the right folks. So we've taken a product, services, support, and training strategy that allows us to meet our customers where they are in their cloud native journey and assures us that we can provide the right level of expertise regardless of where they are. >> Right. What's been the biggest, of all the challenges that you see when people are getting started, what's some of the biggest challenges that you just see over and over and over again that you know you're going to get walking in the door? >> Over and over, you see training is just a constant, across the entire industry. No matter where a customer is in their evolution or their journey, they're constantly having to train, whether they're hiring and then training folks on the new way of developing or they're taking developers who have been building code and building applications in virtual machines or old monoliths for years that they want to train to this new paradigm. Training is a huge constant. The other piece is people are looking to rationalize their infrastructure. So services, we are in a very services-led industry right now where we can come in and help customers get stock of where are we today and where do we want to go long-term, and then put them on a plan, put them on a program or a path where they can achieve those outcomes, but do it in a way that's not disruptive or adds (mumbles). >> Right, 'cause the complexity just continues to increase. It's funny, you know, both Amazon introduced a piece of Amazon Cloud you can stick in your data center, and Google introduced a piece of Google Cloud that you can stick in your data center, and Microsoft recently introduced a piece of Azure that you can stick in your data center. So kind of this, you know, kind of real aggressive embracing of hybrid and this real embracing of complex setups where you can partition your workload based on where you think that workload should run today is really gaining hold. So the complexity is only going up, not going down. >> It is, you're absolutely right. And I will tell you, what you just brought up is a great example of why the complexity's going up. On-prem is a massively different, materially different environment than the clouds. The clouds are built on a margin, right? They're built on, if I take the same server and do this over and over again, I get repeatability, I get consistency, I get a very finite platform. If you look at how on-prem is, the traditional data center, you buy some servers from Dell, some servers from HP, storage from EMC, storage from HP. You've got all different types of hardware and software in there. So fixing that on-prem cloud is hard, and the clouds are struggling with this because the concept of taking their very clean, vanilla infrastructure and bringing that to the traditional on-premise is failing. That's where we shine. That's where we've built. That's where Mesosphere got their initial start was taking the cloud concept and bring it to the traditional data center. So we're helping clouds extend now by being that on-prem piece that speaks seamlessly with the clouds that our customers choose to use. >> Right. So I think, too, initially, the cloud was seen as a way to save money, and I've seen that evolve over time. It's really much more about speed and agility in your development cycles and getting new products to market. Do customers grok that? Are they still kind of wrestling with the cost savings and this is kind of an alternative way to buy compute and networking and capacity, or are they really moving fast because of the speed and the competitive threats? >> So I think it's interesting, and it varies, but I will tell you just from my lens, I'll say that a lot of customers are confused. They went to the cloud initially because they believe they wanted to be out of the data center game. It was easier for Amazon or Microsoft or Google to manage the data center than it was for their own IT teams. And so they shifted infrastructure up there, and then what they saw was the promises of hyperscaling, the promises of this elasticity. Your application grows as more users show up. They never realized that because those applications were built under a different premise, under a different architecture, and don't leverage the cloud native capabilities. So you're seeing a shift of people who've moved infrastructure or applications to the cloud to get out of the data center are now saying, okay, I'm kind of locked in, but where do I get my operational efficiency? Where do I get my hyperscaling? How do I get that? And now you're staring to see that shift from just using the clouds as infrastructure to more moving towards microservices, containers, and some of the things that Day2IQ helps with. >> Right, right. It's pretty funny, too, right? 'Cause the apps used to have to be built for the infrastructure on which you were going to deploy them. >> That's right. >> That's now flipped upside down, right? Now the app, the infrastructure needs to support the app. The app comes first, the infrastructure second. >> That's right. >> So having an architecture, you got to have the new architecture. As you said, you just can't simply flip the functionality of an old architecture into a new paradigm. >> And then expect you're going to get the same outcomes. >> Right, right. >> Yeah, very true. >> All right, so before I let you go, I want to get your perspective specifically on security, 'cause again, you were in the security space for a long time. Security's a hot space. Everyone says security has to be baked in everywhere. It can't be the castle and moat anymore. So with your security hat on as you kind of see these migrations and you see these new deployments and you see this move to cloud native, what do you think about from security? Are people baking it in enough? Are they thinking about it in the right way? Is it just such a fundamental shift that they need to think about security and really baking it in from the bottom to the top? >> They absolutely do. And I'll tell you what the scariest thing is, if I go through my CISO networks and talk to folks who are on that side of the fence, they're not even educated to this cloud native space yet. They don't really understand how it's happening and how it's evolving and what that means. So there's a huge education that needs to happen in security, but these things need to be bolted on from the beginning. I'll give you an example. Some of the value that comes from operating cloud native is that your ability to push code and push changes is very agile and quick. So it's encouraged in a cloud native type of architecture that a company can make 100 to 200, 300 code changes a day. >> Right. >> Right? When I grew up, you'd make those monthly, quarterly, right? 'Cause you had a whole bunch of testing. And how they push code multiple times a day. If you don't have your security team in lockstep with those developers and operations staff, how quickly can you get out of compliance? How quickly can you erode your security posture? These are all questions that have to be answered, and we're just at the very earliest stages of getting that. >> Right, and we didn't even talk about IoT and edge devices. >> Absolutely. >> Which opens up a whole different kind of threat surface. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Brian, well, thanks for taking a few minutes. Good luck on the journey and hope things go super for you here. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, he's Brian, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Day2 headquarters, Day2IQ headquarters in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (techno music)

>>from San Francisco. It's the queue every day to thank you. Brought to you by day to like you. Hey, >>welcome back already, Jeffrey. Here with the Cube were a day to IQ's headquarters in downtown San Francisco. They used to be metal sphere, which is what you might know them as. And they've rebranded earlier this year. And they're really talking about helping Enterprises in their journey to cloud native. And we're really excited to have really one of the product guys he's been here and seeing this journey and how through with the customers and helping the company transforming his Chandler hosing tonight. He's the s VP of engineering and product. Chandler, great to see you. Thanks. So, first off, give everyone kind of a background on on the day to like you. I think a lot of people knew mesosphere. You guys around making noise? What kind of changed in the marketplace to to do a rebranding? >>Sure. Yeah, we've been obviously, Mason's here in the past and may so so I think a lot of people watching the cube knows No, no one knows about Mace ose as as we were going along our journey as a company. We noticed that a lot of people are also asking for carbonates. Eso We've actually been working with kubernetes since I don't know 16 4017 something that for a while now and as Maur Maur as communities ecosystem starting involving mature more. We also want to jump in and take advantage of that. And we started building some products that were specific to kubernetes and eso. We thought, Look, you know, it's a little bit confusing for people May, SOS and Kubernetes and at times those two technologies were seen almost as competitive, even though we didn't always see it that way. The market saw it that way, so we said, Look, this is going too confusing for customers being called Mesa Sphere. Let's let's rebrand around Maur what we really do. And we felt like what we do is not just focus around one specific technology. We felt like we helped customers with more than that more than just may so support more than just community support, Andi said. Look, let's let's get us a name that shows what we actually do for customers, and that's really helping them take their workloads and put them on on Not just, you know, um, a source platform, but actually take their workloads, bring them into production and enterprise way. That's really ready for day two. And that's that's why we called it data. >>And let's unpack the day to, cause I think some people are really familiar with the concept of day two. And for some people, they probably never heard it. But it's a pretty interesting concept, and I think it packs a lot of meaning in it. A number of letters. I think you >>can kind of just think about it if you were writing software, right? I mean, Day zero is okay. We're gonna design it. We're gonna start playing with some ideas. We're gonna pull into different technologies. We're gonna do a POC. We're gonna build our skateboards. So to say, that's kind of your day. Zero. What do we want? Okay, we're gonna build a Data Analytics pipeline. We want spark. We're going to store data. Cassandra, we're gonna use cough. Go to pass it around. We're gonna run our containers on top of communities. That's just kind of your day. Zero idea. You get it working, you slap it on a cluster. Things are good right? Day one might be okay. Let's actually do a beta put in production in some kind of way. You start getting customers using it. But now, in Day two, after all that's done, you're like, Wait a second. Things were going wrong. Where's our monitoring? We didn't set that up. Where's our logging? Oh, I don't know. Like, >>who do we >>call this? Our container Run time, we think has above. Who do we call like? Oh, I don't know What support contract that we cut, Right? So that's the things that we want to help customers with. We want to help them in the whole journey, getting to Day two. But once they're there, we want them to be ready for day two, right? And that's what we do. >>I love it because one of my favorite quotes I've used it 1000 times. I'll do 2001 right? Is that open source is free like a puppy. Exactly for you. When you leave you guys, you're not writing a check necessarily to the to the shelter, But there's a whole lot of other check. You got a right and take care of. And I think that's such a key piece. Thio Enterprise, right. They need somebody to call when that thing breaks. >>Yeah. I mean, I haven't come from enterprise company. I was actually a customer basis Fear before I joined. Yeah, that's exactly why we're customers that we wanted. Not only that, insurance policy, but someone that partner with us as we start figuring this out, you know? I mean, just picking. You know what container run time do I want to use with communities? That one decision could take months if you're not familiar with it. And you you put a couple of your best architects on it. Go research container. You go research, cryo go research doctor. Tell me what's what's the best one we should use with kubernetes. Whereas if you're going, if you have a partnership with a company like day two, you can say, Look, I trust these. You know this company, they they're they're experts of this and they see a lot of this. Let's go with their recommendation. It's >>okay. So you got you got your white board. You've got a whole bunch of open source things going on, right? And you've got a whole bunch of initiatives and the pressure's coming down from from on high to get going, you've got containers, Asian and Cloud native and hybrid Cloud all the stuff. And then you've got some port CEO on his team trying to figure it out. You guys have a whole plethora of service is around some of these products. So as you try it and then you got the journey right and you don't start from from a standing start. You gotta go. You gotta go. So how do you map out the combination of how people progress through their journey? What are the different types of systems that they want to put in place and into, prioritize and have some type of a logical successful implementation and roll out of these things from day zero day 132? No, it's >>a great question. I think that's actually how we formed our product. Strategy is we've been doing this for a while now and we've we've gone. We've gone on this journey with really big advanced customers like ride sharing companies and large telcos customers like that. We've also gone on this journey with smaller, less sophisticated customers like, you know, industrial customers from the Midwest. Right? And those are two very, very different customers. But what's similar is they're both going on the same journey we feel like, but they're just at different places. So we wanted to build products, find the customer where they're at in their journey, and the way we see it really is just at the very beginning. It's just training, right? So we have, ah, bunch of support. We're sorry. Service is around training. Help you understand? Not just kubernetes, but the whole cloud native ecosystem. So what is all this stuff? How does it work? How does it fit together? How do I just deploy simple app to right? That's the beginning of it. We also have some products in that area as well, to help people scale their training across the whole whole organization. So that's really exciting for us once once, once that customer has their training down there like Okay, look, get I need a cluster now, like I need a destroyer of sorts and criminals itself is great, but it needs a lot of pieces to actually get it ready for prime time. And that's where we build a product called Convoy Say Okay, here is your enterprise great. Ready to go kubernetes destro right out of the box. And that product is really it's what you could use to just fiddle around with communities. It's also what you put into production right on the game. That's that's been scale tested, security tests and mixed workload tested. It's everything. So that's that's kind of our communities. Destro. So you've gotten your training. You have your destro and now you're like, OK, I actually wanna want to run some applesauce. >>Let me hold there. Is it Is it open corps? Or, you know, there's a lot of conversation in the way the boys actually >>the way we built convoy. It's a great question. The way we build convoys said, Okay, we don't We want to pick the best of breed from each of these. Have you seen the cloud native ecosystem kind of like >>by charter, high charter, whatever it is, where they have all the logos and all the different spiral thing. So it's crazy. Got thousands of logos, right? And >>we said, Look, we're gonna navigate this for you. What's the best container run time to pick. And it's It's almost as if we were gonna build this for ourselves using all open source technology. So convoys completely opens. Okay, um, there's some special sauce that we put in on how to bring these things together. Install it. But all the actual components itself is open source. Okay, so that's so if you're a customer, you're like, OK, I want open source. I don't want to be tied to any specific vendor. I want to run on Lee open. So >>yeah, I was just thinking in terms of you know, how Duke is a reference right. And you had, you know, the Horton worst cloud there and map our strategies, which were radically different in the way they actually packaged told a dupe under the covers. Yeah, >>you can think of it similar. How Cloudera per ship, Possibly where they had cdh. And they brought in a lot of open source. But they also had a lot of proprietary components to see th and what we've tried to get away from it is tying someone in tow. Us. I know that sounds counterintuitive from a business perspective, but we don't want customers to feel like if I go with D to like you. I always have to go with me to like you. I have to drink the Kool Aid, and I'm never gonna be able to get off. >>Kind of not. Doesn't really go with the open source. Exactly this stuff. It's not >>right for our customers, right? A lot of our customers want that optionality, and they don't want to feel locked in. And so when we built convoy, he said, Look, you know, if we were to start our own company, not not an infrastructure coming that we are right now, but just a software company build any kind of ab How would we approach it? And that was one of the problems we saw for We don't wanna feel like we're tied into any. >>Right. Okay, so you got to get the training, you got the products. What's >>next? What's next is if you think about the journey, you're like, OK, a lot. What we've found and this may or may not be totally true is one of the first things people like to run on committees is actually they're builds. So see, I see. And we said, How can we help with this. We looked around the market and there's a lot of great see, I see products out there right now. There's get lab, which is great partner of ours. It's a great product. There's there's your older products. Like Jenkins. There's a bunch of sass products, Travis. See all these things. But what we we wanted to do if we were customers of our own products is something that was native to Kubernetes. And so we started looking at projects like tectonic and proud. Some of these projects, right? And we said, How can we do the same thing we did with convoy where we bring these projects together and make it easy for someone to adopt these kubernetes native. See, I see tools. And we did some stuff there that we think is pretty innovative as well. And that's what that's the product we call dispatch. >>Okay. What do you got? More than just products. You've got profession service. That's right. So now >>you need help setting all this up. How do you actually bring your legacy applications to this new platform? How do you get your legacy builds onto these new build systems That that's where our service is coming the plate and kind of steer you through this whole journey. Lastly, what we next in the journey, though? Those service's compliment Really? Well, with with the kind of the rest of the product suite, right? And we didn't just stop with C i c. He said, what is the next type of work that we want to run here? Okay, so there we looked at things like red hat operators. Right? And we said, Look, red hats doing really cool thing here with this operator framework, how can we simplify it? We learn we've done a lot of this before with D. C. O s, where we built what we called the DCS sdk to help people bring advanced complex workloads onto that platform. And we saw a lot of similarities with operators to our d c West sdk. We said, How can we bring some of our understanding and knowledge to that world? And we built this open source product called kudo. Okay, people are free to go check that out. And that's how we bring more advanced workload. So if you think about the journey back to the journey again, you got some training you have your have your cluster, you put your builds on it. Now you want to run some advance work logs? That's where Kudo comes. >>Okay? And then finally, at the end of the trail is 1 800 I need help. Well, almost into the trail. We're not there yet. There was one thing they're still moving with one more step right on >>the very last one. Actually, we said, Okay, what's next in this journey? And that's running multiple clusters of the same. Okay, so that's kind of the scale. That's the end of the journey from for us, for our proxy as it stands right now. And that's where you build a product called Commander. And that's really helping us launch and manage multiple >>companies clusters at the same time. >>So it's so great that you have the perspective of a customer and you bring that directly in two. You know what you want because you just have gone through this this journey. But I'm just curious, you know, if you put your old hat on, you know, kind of c i o your customer. You know, you just talked about the cake chart with Lord knows how many logos? How do you help people even just begin to think about about the choices and about the crazy rapid change in what? That I mean? Kubernetes wasn't a thing four years ago to help them stay on top of it to help them, you know, both kind of have a night to the vision, you know, make sure you're delivering today on not just get completely distracted by every bright, shiny object that happens to come along. Yeah, no, >>I think it's really challenging for the buyers. You know, I think there's a, especially as the industry continues to make sure there's a new concept that gets thrown at all times. Service Manager. You know, some new, cool way to do monitoring or logging right? And you almost feel like a dinosaur. If you're not right on top of these things to go to a conference in, are you using? You know, you know B P f. Yet what is that? You didn't feel right? Exactly. I think I think most importantly, what customers want is the ability what, the ability to move their technology and their platforms as their business has the need. If the need isn't there for the business, and the technology is running well. There shouldn't be a reason to move to a new platform. Our new set of technologies, in fact, with dese us with Mason charities. To us, we have a lot of happy customers that are gonna be moving crib. Amazing if they wanted to anytime soon. Do you see What's that? Something's that criminal is currently doesn't do. It may never do because the community is just not focused on it that DCS is solving. And those customers just want to see that will continue to support them in the journey that they're on with their their business. And I think that's what's most important is just really understanding our customer's understanding their business, understand where they wanna go. What are their goals, So to say, for their technology platforms and and making sure you were always one step ahead >>of them, that's a >>good place to be one step ahead of demand. All right, well, thanks for for taking a few minutes and sharing the story. Appreciate it. Okay. Thank you. All right. Thanks. Chandler. I'm Jeff. You're watching >>the Cube. Where? Day two. I >>Q in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time

(informative tune) >> From San Francisco, it's The Cube. Covering D2 iQ. Brought to you by D2 iQ. (informative tune) >> Hey, welcome back everybody! Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at D2 iQ Headquarters, a beautiful office space here, right downtown. And we're talking about customers' journey to cloud data. We talk about it all the time, you hear about cloud native, everyone's rushing in, Kubernetes is the hottest thing since sliced bread, but the at the end of the day, you actually have to do it and we're really excited to talk to the founder who's been on his own company journey as he's watching his customers' company journeys and really kind of get into it a little bit. So, excited to have Tobi Knaup, he's a co-founder and CTO of D2 iQ. Tobi, great to see you! >> Thanks for having me. >> So, before we jump into the company and where you are now, I want to go back a little bit. I mean, looking through your resume, and your LinkedIn, etc. You're doing it kind of the classic dream-way for a founder. Did the Y Combinator thing, you've been at this for six years, you've changed the company a little bit. So, I wonder if you can just share form a founder's perspective, I think you've gone through four, five rounds of funding, raised a lot of money, 200 plus million dollars. As you sit back now, if you even get a chance, and kind of reflect, what goes through your head? As you've gone through this thing, pretty cool. A lot of people would like this, they think they'd like to be sitting in your seat. (chuckles) What can you share? >> Yeah, it's definitely been, you know, an exciting journey. And it's one that changes all the time. You know, we learned so many things over the years. And when you start out, you create a company, right? A tech company, you have you idea for the product, you have the technology. You know how to do that, right? You know how to iterate that and build it out. But there's many things you don't know as a technical founder with an engineering background, like myself. And so, I always joke with the team internally, this is that, you know, I basically try to fire myself every six months. And what I mean by that, is your role really changes, right? In the very beginning I wrote code and then is tarted managing engineers, when, you know, once you built up the team, then managed engineering managers and then did product and, you know. Nowadays, I spend a lot of time with customers to talk about our vision, you know, where I see the industry going, where things are going, how we fit into the greater picture. So, it's, you know, I think that's a big part of it, it's evolving with the company and, you know, learning the skills and evolving yourself. >> Right. It's just funny cause you think about tech founders and there's some big ones, right? Some big companies out there, to pick on Zuckerberg's, just to pick on him. But you know, when you start and kind of what your vision and your dream is and what you're coding in that early passion, isn't necessarily where you end up. And as you said, your role in more of a leadership position now, more of a guidance and setting strategy in communicating with the market, communicating with customers has changed. Has that been enjoyable for you, do you, you know, kind of enjoy more the, I don't want to say the elder states when you're a young guy, but more kind of that leadership role? Or just, you know, getting into the weeds and writing some code? >> Yeah. Yeah, what always excites me, is helping customers or helping people solve problems, right? And we do that with technology, in our case, but really it's about solving the problems. And the problems are not always technical problems, right? You know, the software that is at the core of our products, that's been running in production for many years and, you know, in some sense, what we did before we founded the company, when I worked at Airbnb and my co-founders worked at, you know, Airbnb and Twitter, we're still helping companies do those same things today. And so, where we need to help the most sometimes, it's actually on education, right? So, solving those problems. How do you train up, you know, a thousand or 10 thousand internal developers at a large organization, on what are containers, what is container management, cluster management, how does cloud native work? That's often the biggest challenge for folks and, you know, how did they transform their processes internally, how did they become really a cloud native organization. And so, you know, what motivates me is helping people solve problems in, whatever, you know, shape or form. >> Right >> It's funny because it's analogous to what you guys do, in that you got an open-source core, but people, I think, are often underestimate the degree of difficulty around all the activities beyond just the core software. >> Mm-hmm. >> Whether, as you said, it's training, it's implementation it's integration, it's best practices, it's support, it's connecting all these things together and staying on top of it. So, I think, you know, you're in a great position because it's not the software. That's not the hard part, that's arguably, the easy part. So, as you've watched people, you know, deal with this crazy acceleration of change in our industry and this rapid move to cloud native, you know, spawned by the success of the public clouds, you know, how do you kind of stay grounded and not jump too fast at the next shiny object, but still stay current, but still, you know, kind of keep to your kneading in terms of your foundation of the company and delivering real value for the customers? >> Yeah. Yeah, I know, it's exactly right. A lot of times, the challenges with adopting open-sourcing enterprise are, for example, around the skills, right? How do you hire a team that can manage that deployment and manage it for many years? Cause once software's introduced in an enterprise, it typically stays for a couple of years, right? And this gets especially challenging when you're using very popular open-source project, right? Because you're competing for those skills with, literally, everybody, right? A lot of folks want to deploy these things. And then, what people forget sometimes too is, so, a lot of the leading open-source projects, in the cloud native space, came out of, you know, big software companies, right? Kubernetes came from Google, Kafka came from LinkedIn, Cassandra from Facebook. And when those companies deploy these systems internally, they have a lot of other supporting infrastructure around it, right? And a lot of that is centered around day-two operations. Right? How do you monitor these things, how do you do lock management, how do you do do change management, how do you upgrade these things, keep current? So, all of that supporting infrastructure is what an enterprise also needs to develop in order to adopt open-source software and that's a big part of what we do. >> Right. So, I'd love to get your perspective. So, you said, you were at Airbnb, your founders were at Twitter. You know, often people, I think enterprises, fall into the trap of, you know, we want to be like the hyper-scale guys, you know. We want to be like Google or we want to be like Twitter. But they're not. But I'm sure there's a lot of lessons that you learned in watching the hyper-growth of Airbnb and Twitter. What are some of those ones that you can bring and hep enterprises with? What are some of the things that they should be aware of as, not necessarily maybe their sales don't ramp like those other companies, but their operations in some of these new cloud native things do? >> Right, right. Yeah, so, it's actually, you know, when we started the company, the key or one of the drivers was that, you know, we looked at the problems that we solved at Airbnb and Twitter and we realized that those problems are not specific to those two companies or, you know, Silicon Valley tech companies. We realized that most enterprises in the future will have, will be facing those problems. And a core one is really about agility and innovation. Right? Marc Andreessen, one of our early investors, said, "Software is eating the world." he wrote that up many years ago. And so, really what that means is that most enterprises, most companies on the planet, will transform into a software company. With all of that entails, right? With he agility that software brings. And, you know, if they don't do that, their competitors will transform into a software company and disrupt them. So, they need to become software companies. And so, a lot of the existing processes that these existing companies have around IT, don't work in that kind of environment, right? You just can't have a situation where, you know, a developer wants to deploy a new application that, you know, is very, you know, brings a lot of differentiation for the business, but the first thing they need to do in order to deploy that is file a ticket with IT and then someone will get to it in three months, right? That is a lot of waste of time and that's when people surpass you. So, that was one of the key-things we saw at Airbnb and Twitter, right? They were also in that old-school IT approach, where it took many months to deploy something. And deploying some of the software we work with, got that time down to even minutes, right? So it's empowering developers, right? And giving them the tools to make them agile so they can be innovative and bring the business forward. >> Right. The other big issue that enterprises have that you probably didn't have in some of those, you know, kind of native startups, is the complexity and the legacy. >> That's right. >> Right? So you've got all this old stuff that may or may not make any sense to redeploy, you've got stuff (laughing) stuff running in data centers, stuff running on public clouds, everybody wants to get the hyper-cloud to have a single point of view. So, it's a very different challenge when you're in the enterprises. What are you seeing, how are you helping them kind of navigate through that? >> Yeah, yeah. So, one of the first thongs we did actually, so, you know, most of our products are sort of open-core products. They have a lot of open-source at the center, but then, you know, we add enterprise components around that. Typically the first thing that shows up is around security, right? Putting the right access controls in place, making sure the traffic is encrypted. So, that's one of the first things. And then often, the companies we work with, are in a regulated environment, right? Banks, healthcare companies. So, we help them meet those requirements as well and often times that means, you know, adding features around the open-source products to get them to that. >> Right. So, like you said, the world has changed even in the six or seven years you've been at this. The, you know, containers, depending who you talk to, were around, not quite so hot. Docker's hot, Kubernetes is hot. But one of the big changes that's coming now, looking forward, is IOT and EDGE. So, you know, you just mentioned security, from the security point of view, you know, now you're tax services increased dramatically, we've done some work with Forescout and their secret sauce and they just put a sniffer on your network and find the hundreds and hundreds of devices (laughs)-- >> Yeah. >> That you don't even know are on your network. So do you look forward to kind of the opportunity and the challenges of IOT supported by 5G? What's that do for your business, where do you see opportunities, how are you going to address that? >> Yeah, so, I think IOT is really one of those big mega-trends that's going to transform a lot of things and create all kinds of new business models. And, really, what IOT is for me at the core, it's all around data, right? You have all these devices producing data, whether those are, you know, sensors in a factory in a production line, or those have, you know, cars on the road that send telemetry data in real time. IOT has been, you know, a big opportunity for us. We work with multiple customers that are in the space. And, you know, one fundamental problem with it is that, with IOT, a lot of the data that organizations need to process, are now, all of a sudden generated at the EDGE of the network, right? This wasn't the case many years for enterprises, right? Most of the data was generated, you know, at HQ or in some internal system, not at the EDGE of the network. And what always happens is when, with large-volume data is, compute generally moves where the data is and not the other way around. So, for many of these deployments, it's not efficient to move all that data from those IT devices to a central-cloud location or data-center location. So, those companies need to find ways to process data at the EDGE. That's a big part of what we're helping them with, it's automating real-time data services and machine-learning services, at the EDGE, where the EDGE can be, you know, factories all around the world, it could be cruise ships, it could be other types of locations where working with customers. And so, essentially what we're doing is we're bringing the automation that people are used to from the public cloud to the EDGE. So, you know, with the click of a button or a single command you can install a database or a machine-learning system or a message queue at all those EDGE locations. And then, it's not just that stuff is being deployed at the EDGE, I think the, you know, the standard type of infrastructure-mix, for most enterprises, is a hybrid one. I think most organizations will run a mix of EDGE, their data centers and typically multiple public cloud providers. And so, they really need a platform where they can manage applications across all of those environments and well, that's big value that our products bring. >> Yeah. I was at a talk the other day with a senior exec, formerly from Intel, and they thought that it's going to level out at probably 50-50, you know, kind of cloud-based versus on-prem. And that's just going to be the way it is cause it's just some workloads you just can't move. So, exciting stuff, so, what as you... I can't believe we're coming to the end of 2019, which is amazing to me. As you look forward to 2020 and beyond, what are some of your top priorities? >> Yeah, so, one of my top priorities is really, around machine-learning. I think machine-learning is one of these things that, you know, it's really a general-purpose tool. It's like a hammer, you can solve a lot of problems with it. And, you know, besides doing infrastructure and large-scale infrastructure, machine-learning has, you know, always been sort of my second baby. Did a lot of work during grad-school and at Airbnb. And so, we're seeing more and more customers adopt machine-learning to do all kinds of interesting, you know, problems like predictive maintenance in a factory where, you know, every minute of downtime costs a lot of money. But, machine-learning is such a new space, that a lot of the best practices that we know from software engineering and from running software into production, those same things don't always exist in machine-learning. And so, what I am looking at is, you know, what can we take from what we learned running production software, what can we take and move over to machine-learning to help people run these models in production and you know, where can we deploy machine-learning in our products too, internally, to make them smarter and automate them even more. >> That's interesting because the machine-learning and AI, you know, there's kind of the tools and stuff, and then there's the application of the tools. And we're seeing a lot of activity around, you know, people using ML in a specific application to drive better performances. As you just said,-- >> Mm-hmm. >> You could do it internally. >> Do you see an open-source play in machine-learning, in AI? Do you see, you know, kind of open-source algorithms? Do you see, you know, a lot of kind of open-source ecosystem develop around some of this stuff? So, just like I don't have time to learn data science, I won't necessarily have to have my own algorithms. How do you see that,-- >> Yeah. >> You know, kind of open-source meets AI and ML, of all things? >> Yeah. It's a space I think about a lot and what's really great, I think is that we're seeing a lot of the open-source, you know, best-practice that we know from software, actually, move over to machine-learning. I think it's interesting, right? Deep-learning is all the rage right now, everybody wants to do deep-learning, deep-learning networks. The theory behind deep-networks is actually, you know, pretty old. It's from the '70s and 80's. But for a long time, we dint have that much, enough compute-power to really use deep-learning in a meaningful way. We do have that now, but it's still expensive. So, you know, to get cutting edge results on image recognition or other types of ML problems, you need to spend a lot of money on infrastructure. It's tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to train a model. So, it's not accessible to everyone. But, the great news is that, much like in software engineering, we can use these open-source libraries and combine them together and build upon them. There is, you know, we have that same kind of composability in machine-learning, using techniques like transfer-learning. And so, you can actually already see some, you know, open-community hubs spinning up, where people publish models that you can just take, they're pre-trained. You can take them and you know, just adjust them to your particular use case. >> Right. >> So, I think a lot of that is translating over. >> And even though it's expensive today, it's not going to be expensive tomorrow, right? >> Mm-hhm. >> I mean, if you look through the world in a lens, with, you know, the price of compute-store networking asymptotically approaching zero in the not-to-distant future and think about how you attack problems that way, that's a very different approach. And sure enough, I mean, some might argue that Moore's Law's done, but kind of the relentless march of Moore's Law types of performance increase it's not done, it's not necessarily just doubling up of transistors anymore >> Right >> So, I think there's huge opportunity to apply these things a lot of different places. >> Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. >> Can be an exciting future. >> Absolutely! (laughs) >> Tobi, congrats on all your successes! A really fun success story, we continue to like watching the ride and thanks for spending the few minutes with us. >> Thank you very much! >> All right. He's Tobi, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube, we're at D2 iQ Headquarters downtown in San Francisco. Thanks for watching, we'll catch you next time! (electric chime)